CES Wrap
Show Lumbers on Despite Economic Woes
By Roger L. Kay
The signs of a greatly diminished CES were everywhere last week: two minutes to get on a
shuttle from the airport, hardly any check-in line at the hotel, no wait to get the badge holder,
plentiful empty cabs, cabbies opining about a figure of 80,000 attendees, bar tenders opining
about sparsely populated rooms, easy paths through the show floor with few clots of gawkers,
no checkout line at the hotel, no wait for the cab to the airport, and even no wait in the departing
security line.
And more evidence of a pall could be seen in Microsoft’s having moved its whole operation out
of its usual tents across the way and onto the show floor, all the better to increase the
impression of density. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody no good, and an attendee was heard to
say he was able to do more deals because he could actually get to where he was going. As the
few days of the formerly largest show in town approached, hotels dropped prices, and two,
Flamingo and Rio, were even offering Wednesday night for free in an attempt to draw traffic.
The show’s odd timing — falling across the end of the work week and the weekend rather than
starting on Sunday and going through midweek as is usual — threw everybody off a bit. For the
first time, CES goers could see Las Vegas fill up with its usual weekend traffic of partiers from
surrounding states, a crew who overwhelmed the attendees still on their feet Saturday.
Reservations for dinner could pretty much be had for the asking.
Oddly, the gadgets were better than ever. The show floor sparkled with phones, navigation
devices, portable entertainment systems, flat panels of all sizes and resolutions, automotive
electronics, and netbooks, to name just a few. There was even a guy there selling fully
assembled fir sauna baths, consumer enough, although the electronics angle eludes me.
The only true excitement of the show came from Palm, which introduced the Pre on the first day.
With its team of ex-Apple people, the struggling smart-phone supplier cheered investors as well
as the electronics fraternity with its cool design, great features, and flexible new OS.
Microsoft, arguably the show’s lynchpin, managed to communicate key messages about its
upcoming Window 7 launch, releasing the beta and setting the tone for the repositioning of
Windows. The updated OS comes at an interesting time: Apple has already fired its most
powerful salvos and its chief executive seems set to pass the mantel to less charismatic
lieutenants. Microsoft is about to assemble the strongest product portfolio it’s had in years, and
if it can deliver on the promise of Windows 7 — faster performance, smaller footprint, friendlier
interface, useful improvements — then the company may be able to repair some of the brand
damage wrought by Vista.
True to the Byzantine nature of graphics technology, AMD’s latest external mobile graphics
offerings, the HD 4000 Series, were explained to me by a guy with no vowels in either of his
names. The AMD parts can deliver a teraflops to a notebook in a Crossfire configuration.
NVIDIA showed its disruptively named Ion, a graphics part designed to extend Intel’s Atom
processor to more mainstream notebooks. Intel is trying to keep the wildly successful Atom
from eating too far into its Centrino franchise. We’ll have to see whether NVIDIA’s Ion customers
find their Atom allocations mysteriously disappearing.
Even at a diminished show, it was still impossible to get a complete view of what was on offer,
but some of the fun devices and products that caught my eye included a navigation device from
DeLorme. Although the nav functions are just like everybody else’s, the little unit’s low power
consumption and rugged case make it appropriate for biking, a mode near and dear to me.
And while backup solutions continue to proliferate, one I particularly liked, and which is
beginning to get some traction, is Clickfree, essentially very simple backup software. The
software is packaged on attractive external hard drives, but it can also transform a DVD or any
other storage device into a Clickfree drive, and at the show the company introduced a USB cable
that turns any external drive into a Clickfree device. When a drive is plugged into a computer, the
application launches. If it’s the first time, the friendly interface takes the user through a three-
step dialog to set up which directories are to be backed up, and thereafter the script executes
without any further discussion. Files can be restored as necessary, either individually or en
masse.
Also worthy of note was Phoenix Technologies’ consumer coming out party. Phoenix has
supplied BIOS technology to the PC industry for years, but also has a host of other intellectual
property that has been only minimally exploited. Recently, the company packaged some of its
pre-boot environment technology into a product it calls HyperSpace, a sort of alternative OS
capable of running a browser, doing some system diagnostics, and hosting through add-ons a
number of consumer applications like media play and email. At the show, Phoenix had a booth
and a party, effectively saying to the community, look, you may think of us as an industrial
supplier, but here we are, ready to supply consumers directly. Anyone can download
HyperSpace from the Web for a free 21-day trial. Oh, and did I mention that the big advantage of
HyperSpace is “instant” on? Well, five seconds, but still. And it’s miserly in its use of power.
The user can run HyperSpace as the sole OS, although the product is conceived to run as an
adjunct to Windows, since it’s pretty lightweight and not appropriate for processing-intensive
applications. But as consumer computing shifts toward the Cloud, HyperSpace will become
progressively more useful.
The item I most went sniffing after at this show was inventory, specifically PC inventory, but really
any hardware. The question was framed as follows: how soon did the industry know that 4Q08
was going to stink, and were participants able to backpedal furiously enough (canceling orders,
slowing down fabs) to save themselves further trouble in 1Q09? The math looks like this (the
numbers are made up): if in the end 4Q08 was something like 80-85% of what it should have
been or, say, what it was last year, did OEMs and retailers order the original amount, did they
have the foresight to order the new, much lower amount, or did they hedge and do something in
between? Because if one carries the assumption of 80% of normal through into 2009, then Q1
carries the burden not only of a lower sales level, but also of any inventory cleanout required to
make up for miscalculations in 4Q08. To dramatize, 80% of normal volume at the end-user level
could translate into 60% of normal volume at the supply-chain level if everyone was gorged with
product.
So, I went around asking, and things look pretty good, considering the environment. I was most
worried about the front end of the supply chain, the component suppliers. The ones I spoke with
swore they were lean. A notebook drive supplier said, yes, it shipped 65 million instead of the
usual 80 million, but that goods on hand amounted to no more than 3-4 weeks right now. Intel
said it had managed to slow down production of processors early enough to be in reasonably
good shape. Several OEMs said they had enough warning to throttle back in time and do not
have excess inventory. And retailers benefited from the financial crisis because they were
unable to borrow to purchase large inventories, an example of economics actually working for a
change. Bottom line: Q1 will suck, but it won’t suck additionally from inventory.
My own show favorite: a fine new use of consumer electronics in a relevant application. This
year, the little Native American/Guatemalan/Mexican solicitors, who stand in masses in very
precise locations and flick cards with some girl’s picture and a phone number on them (surely
the two have no correlation), improved their ability to reach their target audience by having a least
one guy in each group wearing a flat panel bearing essentially an enlarged image of one of their
cards. These ingenious devices were mounted on what looked like the body side of a
backpack: a padded mount, shoulder straps, and a waist buckle. On the back of the panel was
a full length image, extending up a foot or two past the wearer’s head. Not wasting any real
estate, the inventors of this practical device garnished the front of this two-sided panel, above
the head of the wearer, with ad copy and smaller images, while the back bore the major pitch.
Thus, even with their backs turned, the solicitors could still appeal to an unseen audience.
I’m acutely aware of these people, who actually seem to be whole families working together,
because they are the only ones on the Strip besides me riding bicycles. They don’t wear
helmets. The bicycles are used primarily to carry freight, the string-bound bundles of “literature,”
thrown down to the dusty street from the back of a Toyota truck at sundown. The distributors
stock a few of these bundles in metal baskets and pedal to their appointed sites.
I’ve wondered why they work in groups of up to ten. Could it be that the market is so big that
widening the distribution pipe will actually generate more revenue? You wouldn’t think so. Most
tourists treat them as if they were lepers. Perhaps it’s companionship. You can always hear
them talking in some soft language that seems to be mostly vowels and laughing quietly among
themselves, men and women together. Obviously, their employer isn’t paying extra for the
additional labor. How are they paid? Commission? How would you relate revenue flow to their
activities? One flat fee for the lot of them? Probably. And not a high one at that. How are they
measured? Is it enough to simply stock out their wares? Not possible, as at least half of their
inventory ends up on the street and in bushes no more than 10 meters from where they’re
standing.
But we’ll never know. Because if you try to interview them, they won’t answer. Usually, it’s the
tourists who are afraid of them. With their menacing group-flicking, they seem to be offering you
a peek into your own hidden desires, not something your average passerby is ready for,
particularly if accompanied by his wife. But if you walk right up to them, you break the illusion,
and now it’s their turn to be afraid. It goes like this: “Could I ask you a question? Who makes
those panels?” Wary look. Slight, but perceptible and rapid, head shake. “C’mon, where did
you get them?”
Pause. “No English.” hmmmmmm …
Finally, worst of show goes definitively to American Airlines, which blew my flights both coming
and going. I missed out on three out of four upgrades, which had been on the books for
months, failed to make connections both ways, and lost an entire day when the equipment
leaving Vegas couldn’t be repaired. Maintenance discovered late in the day that they’d have to fly
a part in from Los Angeles. The airline finally threw in the towel at around 2 p.m. for a 8:55 a.m.
scheduled departure. My final night was spent at the airport Doubletree, courtesy of American,
with dinner at Applebee’s. After experiencing prices on the strip, I was unable to spend the
entire $20 in vouchers in that place, ordering the most expensive dishes on the menu.
© 2009 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
shuttle from the airport, hardly any check-in line at the hotel, no wait to get the badge holder,
plentiful empty cabs, cabbies opining about a figure of 80,000 attendees, bar tenders opining
about sparsely populated rooms, easy paths through the show floor with few clots of gawkers,
no checkout line at the hotel, no wait for the cab to the airport, and even no wait in the departing
security line.
And more evidence of a pall could be seen in Microsoft’s having moved its whole operation out
of its usual tents across the way and onto the show floor, all the better to increase the
impression of density. It’s an ill wind that blows nobody no good, and an attendee was heard to
say he was able to do more deals because he could actually get to where he was going. As the
few days of the formerly largest show in town approached, hotels dropped prices, and two,
Flamingo and Rio, were even offering Wednesday night for free in an attempt to draw traffic.
The show’s odd timing — falling across the end of the work week and the weekend rather than
starting on Sunday and going through midweek as is usual — threw everybody off a bit. For the
first time, CES goers could see Las Vegas fill up with its usual weekend traffic of partiers from
surrounding states, a crew who overwhelmed the attendees still on their feet Saturday.
Reservations for dinner could pretty much be had for the asking.
Oddly, the gadgets were better than ever. The show floor sparkled with phones, navigation
devices, portable entertainment systems, flat panels of all sizes and resolutions, automotive
electronics, and netbooks, to name just a few. There was even a guy there selling fully
assembled fir sauna baths, consumer enough, although the electronics angle eludes me.
The only true excitement of the show came from Palm, which introduced the Pre on the first day.
With its team of ex-Apple people, the struggling smart-phone supplier cheered investors as well
as the electronics fraternity with its cool design, great features, and flexible new OS.
Microsoft, arguably the show’s lynchpin, managed to communicate key messages about its
upcoming Window 7 launch, releasing the beta and setting the tone for the repositioning of
Windows. The updated OS comes at an interesting time: Apple has already fired its most
powerful salvos and its chief executive seems set to pass the mantel to less charismatic
lieutenants. Microsoft is about to assemble the strongest product portfolio it’s had in years, and
if it can deliver on the promise of Windows 7 — faster performance, smaller footprint, friendlier
interface, useful improvements — then the company may be able to repair some of the brand
damage wrought by Vista.
True to the Byzantine nature of graphics technology, AMD’s latest external mobile graphics
offerings, the HD 4000 Series, were explained to me by a guy with no vowels in either of his
names. The AMD parts can deliver a teraflops to a notebook in a Crossfire configuration.
NVIDIA showed its disruptively named Ion, a graphics part designed to extend Intel’s Atom
processor to more mainstream notebooks. Intel is trying to keep the wildly successful Atom
from eating too far into its Centrino franchise. We’ll have to see whether NVIDIA’s Ion customers
find their Atom allocations mysteriously disappearing.
Even at a diminished show, it was still impossible to get a complete view of what was on offer,
but some of the fun devices and products that caught my eye included a navigation device from
DeLorme. Although the nav functions are just like everybody else’s, the little unit’s low power
consumption and rugged case make it appropriate for biking, a mode near and dear to me.
And while backup solutions continue to proliferate, one I particularly liked, and which is
beginning to get some traction, is Clickfree, essentially very simple backup software. The
software is packaged on attractive external hard drives, but it can also transform a DVD or any
other storage device into a Clickfree drive, and at the show the company introduced a USB cable
that turns any external drive into a Clickfree device. When a drive is plugged into a computer, the
application launches. If it’s the first time, the friendly interface takes the user through a three-
step dialog to set up which directories are to be backed up, and thereafter the script executes
without any further discussion. Files can be restored as necessary, either individually or en
masse.
Also worthy of note was Phoenix Technologies’ consumer coming out party. Phoenix has
supplied BIOS technology to the PC industry for years, but also has a host of other intellectual
property that has been only minimally exploited. Recently, the company packaged some of its
pre-boot environment technology into a product it calls HyperSpace, a sort of alternative OS
capable of running a browser, doing some system diagnostics, and hosting through add-ons a
number of consumer applications like media play and email. At the show, Phoenix had a booth
and a party, effectively saying to the community, look, you may think of us as an industrial
supplier, but here we are, ready to supply consumers directly. Anyone can download
HyperSpace from the Web for a free 21-day trial. Oh, and did I mention that the big advantage of
HyperSpace is “instant” on? Well, five seconds, but still. And it’s miserly in its use of power.
The user can run HyperSpace as the sole OS, although the product is conceived to run as an
adjunct to Windows, since it’s pretty lightweight and not appropriate for processing-intensive
applications. But as consumer computing shifts toward the Cloud, HyperSpace will become
progressively more useful.
The item I most went sniffing after at this show was inventory, specifically PC inventory, but really
any hardware. The question was framed as follows: how soon did the industry know that 4Q08
was going to stink, and were participants able to backpedal furiously enough (canceling orders,
slowing down fabs) to save themselves further trouble in 1Q09? The math looks like this (the
numbers are made up): if in the end 4Q08 was something like 80-85% of what it should have
been or, say, what it was last year, did OEMs and retailers order the original amount, did they
have the foresight to order the new, much lower amount, or did they hedge and do something in
between? Because if one carries the assumption of 80% of normal through into 2009, then Q1
carries the burden not only of a lower sales level, but also of any inventory cleanout required to
make up for miscalculations in 4Q08. To dramatize, 80% of normal volume at the end-user level
could translate into 60% of normal volume at the supply-chain level if everyone was gorged with
product.
So, I went around asking, and things look pretty good, considering the environment. I was most
worried about the front end of the supply chain, the component suppliers. The ones I spoke with
swore they were lean. A notebook drive supplier said, yes, it shipped 65 million instead of the
usual 80 million, but that goods on hand amounted to no more than 3-4 weeks right now. Intel
said it had managed to slow down production of processors early enough to be in reasonably
good shape. Several OEMs said they had enough warning to throttle back in time and do not
have excess inventory. And retailers benefited from the financial crisis because they were
unable to borrow to purchase large inventories, an example of economics actually working for a
change. Bottom line: Q1 will suck, but it won’t suck additionally from inventory.
My own show favorite: a fine new use of consumer electronics in a relevant application. This
year, the little Native American/Guatemalan/Mexican solicitors, who stand in masses in very
precise locations and flick cards with some girl’s picture and a phone number on them (surely
the two have no correlation), improved their ability to reach their target audience by having a least
one guy in each group wearing a flat panel bearing essentially an enlarged image of one of their
cards. These ingenious devices were mounted on what looked like the body side of a
backpack: a padded mount, shoulder straps, and a waist buckle. On the back of the panel was
a full length image, extending up a foot or two past the wearer’s head. Not wasting any real
estate, the inventors of this practical device garnished the front of this two-sided panel, above
the head of the wearer, with ad copy and smaller images, while the back bore the major pitch.
Thus, even with their backs turned, the solicitors could still appeal to an unseen audience.
I’m acutely aware of these people, who actually seem to be whole families working together,
because they are the only ones on the Strip besides me riding bicycles. They don’t wear
helmets. The bicycles are used primarily to carry freight, the string-bound bundles of “literature,”
thrown down to the dusty street from the back of a Toyota truck at sundown. The distributors
stock a few of these bundles in metal baskets and pedal to their appointed sites.
I’ve wondered why they work in groups of up to ten. Could it be that the market is so big that
widening the distribution pipe will actually generate more revenue? You wouldn’t think so. Most
tourists treat them as if they were lepers. Perhaps it’s companionship. You can always hear
them talking in some soft language that seems to be mostly vowels and laughing quietly among
themselves, men and women together. Obviously, their employer isn’t paying extra for the
additional labor. How are they paid? Commission? How would you relate revenue flow to their
activities? One flat fee for the lot of them? Probably. And not a high one at that. How are they
measured? Is it enough to simply stock out their wares? Not possible, as at least half of their
inventory ends up on the street and in bushes no more than 10 meters from where they’re
standing.
But we’ll never know. Because if you try to interview them, they won’t answer. Usually, it’s the
tourists who are afraid of them. With their menacing group-flicking, they seem to be offering you
a peek into your own hidden desires, not something your average passerby is ready for,
particularly if accompanied by his wife. But if you walk right up to them, you break the illusion,
and now it’s their turn to be afraid. It goes like this: “Could I ask you a question? Who makes
those panels?” Wary look. Slight, but perceptible and rapid, head shake. “C’mon, where did
you get them?”
Pause. “No English.” hmmmmmm …
Finally, worst of show goes definitively to American Airlines, which blew my flights both coming
and going. I missed out on three out of four upgrades, which had been on the books for
months, failed to make connections both ways, and lost an entire day when the equipment
leaving Vegas couldn’t be repaired. Maintenance discovered late in the day that they’d have to fly
a part in from Los Angeles. The airline finally threw in the towel at around 2 p.m. for a 8:55 a.m.
scheduled departure. My final night was spent at the airport Doubletree, courtesy of American,
with dinner at Applebee’s. After experiencing prices on the strip, I was unable to spend the
entire $20 in vouchers in that place, ordering the most expensive dishes on the menu.
© 2009 Endpoint Technologies Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
A Little Bit of This; A Little Bit of That
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